Mea Culpa on Sarah Palin

Mea Culpa on Sarah Palin
Clearly, I was wrong about the impact of Governor Sarah Palin on the ticket of John McCain. As of today, the ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden has fallen very slightly behind that of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the latest polls. The “bounce” in the polls after the Democratic Convention declined under the “bounce” in polling numbers produced by the Republican Convention and the nomination of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It appears now that we have a very close race with a relatively small (5 to 13 percent) number of “undecided” voters, depending largely on how the “undecided” voters are probed by pollsters for which way they are “leaning.”

The polling numbers themselves are hard to interpret. Some polls are publishing results and others are using "likely voters," i.e., the people who are most likely to vote. That makes comparing one poll with another difficult, but they all confirm that McCain has pulled slightly ahead. However, do not expect him to pull well out in front because they are simply not many voters left to convert. Ahead is ahead, of course, and it is better to be moving up and with a lead than falling behind, and trailing.

I do not much like being wrong; a congenital problem that I have carried a long time, but I like even less what this situation says about the voting public. With so much going wrong with the economy, particularly the mortgage market; and so much having gone wrong over the past eight years (the War in Iraq, the deterioration of the international standing of the United States, the growth of “big government”, corruption, and public debt and deficits, the widespread feeling among the public that the Country is moving in the “wrong direction, etc.), it is still hard for me to believe that my fellow citizens would return a Republican Administration to power. But, they might!

But, as we say, wrong is wrong and I have to admit it. The election is going should stay close and McCain and Palin clearly can win. The Republican tacticians are proceeding very carefully with Sarah Palin; keeping her with McCain much of the time where she cannot get into too much trouble and scheduling her to limit her exposure, and they probably can get away with it. After all, they only have to hide her for about six weeks or so, helping to keep her from opportunities to stumble, and the national media can only complain so much. The real focus of the election will return to Obama and McCain, and not the Vice Presidential candidates, although Palin is getting far more coverage than normal and Joe Biden has all but disappeared.

They so-called remaining “undecided voters” are a wide mixture of people, but they are not exactly the kind of people in whom anyone would like to place the fate of their country. In general, they are younger, less politically involved, less likely to vote and operating with less information than most voters, but they are largely more moderate in their political views than either McCain or Obama voters.

Most of the voters with the more information and motivation have largely already made up their minds. The actual percentage of voters who will switch at least once during the next 50 some days is larger than this group of “undecided” voters, so there is some room for change that will diminish as we move past the debates, when opinion will harden even more.

Elections Are Not About Truth, Justice and the American Way
The great Greek tragic dramatist, Aeschylus, writing about 500 BC, stated: “In War, truth in the first casualty.” That is just as accurate for politics, only more so in this modern age of 15 and 30 second attack advertising and highly paid, and effective, spin doctors. modern politics also seems to be only about winning, whatever the cost. America has a long history of elections fraught with enmity over serious and trivial things, but few seem much more consequential than this one. The Democrats want a campaign about issues, which favor them, and the Republicans want a campaign about personalities and other things , which favor them.

Truth is even more elusive when candidates are able to stand behind professional managers and publicists, preserved from the public fire that occurs in a prolonged primary system, protected by the words of professional speech writers, and not permitted even the normal questions in a press conference. Sarah Palin is likely to go down in history as the single most protected and pampered (and least examined)Vice Presidential candidate of all time – a nearly complete blank slate, free of substance and ideas, endowed with a pretty face, where Bush speech writers can put words and funny lines into her mouth. This is probably unfair, but that is the way the McCain tacticians see her since they are the people providing the protection and not the rest of us.

The truth will come out slowly, but the “undecided” are usually the very last people to hear it and often the least concerned about it. The protagonists for both Obama and McCain are reaching that point where they turn off their eyes and ears to new information, especially if it runs counter to what they wish to believe. In truth, we are all like that in the way we do or do not process information. Our interest in new information wanes when we have made up our minds. Searching for new information is normally a costly exercise, and we all avoid it where we can.

“Belief, strongly held”, is also a powerful deterrent to the acquisition of conflicting information. Palin’s Pentecostal roots are only now being examined on the national news, a church where they apparently “talk in tongues”, “directly to God” and anticipate the Armageddon that marks the end of civilization. That will make some people very happy and others equally unhappy, but does it really matter to anyone who understands relatively little about the various sects of Evangelical religions? I'm not so sure!

Her desire to impose censorship on her librarian, who stood up to her and whom she attempted to fire, is now well documented. That is a mixed event politically, however. It outrages anyone with liberal or libertarian views and is cherished by a whole range of Evangelicals who would impose censorship everywhere, if they could. Censorship is a fault line that has run through Civilization and most religions for hundreds of generations, separating the “children of the Enlightenment” from the book burners, like the monk Savronola, who delighted in burning books in Florence until he himself got burned at the stake. This aspect of the modern culture “war” has been with us since the beginning of America and even long before, and the struggle only waxes and wanes, but never really goes away.

She apparently believes in the virtues of teaching creationism in the public schools, another position which educated moderates and liberals hate, but in which the Evangelical Right rejoices. Our children cannot competitively perform math, science and reading in contrast with the rest of the world; but maybe we can verse them in Genesis as a substitute. They might not be able to compete with those pesky Asians and Europeans any more, but “creationism” might make our children and their families feel reassured and happy even as their children’s ability to compete in the modern world erodes.

Contrary to McCain, at least in the past, she would, as President, make it impossible to use fetal stem cells under any circumstances, a fact that should make everyone, like me, who suffers from a chronic illness at least a little uncomfortable, but the public probably won’t realize it until too late. We certainly did not realize until too late that George Bush and Dick Cheney would spend a Trillion dollars, lying to all of us at the time, on an unnecessary war in Iraq, a war which Sarah Palin has asserted is an expression of “God’s will.”

Her rise to the Presidency will, in truth, not affect the stem cell issue very much. Virtually all of the money, jobs, and progress with stem cell research will occur outside of the control of the United States, much of it in Asia, where religiously imposed sensitivities and scruples cannot be imposed by the President of the United States, who has no ability, whatsoever, to stop the flow of research and progress.

For the record, the world today is one huge competitive market where knowledge, skills, and money move across international borders at will. If we have not learned that, as Obama particularly seems not to have learned, we know nothing at all. The good news is that neither the President nor Sarah Palin can block the use of stem cells in research labs across the world. The bad news is that they can easily force the shift in the resources, opportunities, skill sets and jobs, to markets abroad where religious sensitivities do not interfere with basic science and research. The giant, multi-national pharmaceutical companies have labs everywhere and many are not even American, and research dollars follow their investments. Stem cell research will occur, only the knowledge and the jobs will not be American and we will slowly lose our preeminence in that area of research.

The world is watching closely this “play” in the history of our American Democracy. If McCain wins, and he might, there will be a great sadness among our friends in this world. Our allies in this world, and we still have some, will have little or nothing to do with the outcome; they are just spectators, but it affects their lives just as it does ours. According the the international polls, they are hoping overwhelmingly for the “change” that will come only with Barack Obama; not the continuity of current staff, interest groups, contracting companies and lobbies that will be delivered by John McCain. Of course, you might accept the view of too many in the Bush Administration: “With friends like these (the Germans and the French), who needs enemies?”

Finally, the big lobby money is clearly invested overwhelmingly in the McCain campaign, a campaign run largely by the very lobbyists he now decries. They will get their payday as promised, only if he wins, because they have almost no money in the Obama campaign. There have been countless billions stolen from the Federal Treasury over the past eight years, and that is gone, whether Obama gets the job or not. On the other hand, Obama is stating a complete fiction when he argues that we can reach energy independence without using all of our resources, and not just the "green" ones which the Democrats prefer. As I said, truth is the first casualty, often for everyone.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black